Silver_Is_Money
Larry Sayre, Developer of 'Mash Made Easy'
10% HCl is right close to 2.9 Normal. AMS/CRS is right close to 3.66 Normal.
10% HCl is right close to 2.9 Normal. AMS/CRS is right close to 3.66 Normal.
Titration is the best way.
Calculated dilution of 37.2% HCl to 10% HCl:
Late to this party... but yep, I would underline some of the good info here. The above is a good idea, and I see you went that way. Just safer stuff, and you only need a very small amount, starting with dilute stock isn't a bad storage idea.I'd advise going for 10% too - it is neither very volatile nor very dangerous* at that concentration, but 30%+ is far worse. HCl has this peculiar property where it doesn't give off a whole lot of HCl vapor below its azeotrope (20.2%), but its volatility shoots way up when concentrated past it, so that the usual concentrated 37% stuff or the 31% hardware store variety both evolve a lot of nasty, corrosive fumes of hydrogen chloride.
*It is still quite dangerous to the eyes even at 10%. Safety glasses or goggles are absolutely required.
Good you are getting moving with the water thing. Just my thoughts but plenty of beers need more than 80ppm Calcium. The salts you should be using are Calcium Sulphate and Calcium chloride . I make mostly English beers and as an example bitter needs aboutThe acid arrived earlier this week. It was wrapped in clingfilm and shipped in a cardboard box ... and of course in a bottle too, not just clingfilm. The bottle had leaked a few drops during shipping, and I was wiping those off wearing nitrile gloves. Smelled a bit like when I was a new brewer and obsessed with touching cold-side things only with gloves that had been starsaned (not sure if that's a general smell with rubber and acid). The acid itself smelled pretty much like vinegar, though I didn't pour it into a snifter and do a complete olfactory analysis, or actually attempt to smell it at all. Being in the same shed didn't assault my nose e.g. the same way that sniffing vinegar would, so at 10% it *seems* pretty harmless, but I'm going to keep my guard up. I am a bit suspicious about the vinegar-like smell, as I don't think any other acids smell particularly like vinegar. Not sure if I should bother titrating to check that it actually is 10% HCl -- almost seems less work to just hope for the best and brew because the odds of them shipping the wrong product seem infinitesimal.
Not sure if I'll end up getting sodium sulfate to boost the sulfate, since the water is high in calcium (~80mg/L), almost at the limit of magnesium and pretty devoid of sodium and with chloride being maxed out by HCl table salt is, well, off the table. From a pure water perspective, as mentioned in this thread, I'd like to use sulfuric acid, but I'm not going to also for reasons mentioned in this thread.
I prefer more magnesium in a bitter. (them's fighting words ;-)Good you are getting moving with the water thing. Just my thoughts but plenty of beers need more than 80ppm Calcium. The salts you should be using are Calcium Sulphate and Calcium chloride . I make mostly English beers and as an example bitter needs about
150 Ca
10 Mg
40 Na
273 SO4
136 Cl
but I do realise you may be making US beers or other lesser beers![]()
Of course one way of getting the SO4 is with sulphuric acid in conjunction with Hydrochloric acid .
So I've tried HCl with a few brews now, and compared to treating the water by precipitating temporary alkalinity out as CaCO3 the process is awesome. I can decide to brew a pale beer, directly use hot water from the solar heat exchanger, and be done in about 4 hours. The old model was deciding to brew and being able to start the actual brewing in 4 hours, or in a bit under 2 if I rushed the alkalinity removal, or the next day if I did it properly. I also hit my pH targets throughout much better. With alkalinity removal it was a bit uncertain how much chalk precipitated out and how much of the precipitate ended up in the brewing liquor -- the latter does not show up with a TDS meter and you notice it only during the mash (or by titration, but who titrates their water before every brew?).
The 10% HCl doesn't seem any more scary or harmful than my 75/80% phosphoric and lactic acids, as in I don't see fuming, and I don't feel it in my nose/lungs. I'm pretty sure I already got a drop on my hand because I absent-mindedly removed the gloves before rinsing the equipment that touched the acid, but I didn't notice any effect. The only downside with 10% is that you need a lot of it for a chloride-heavy beer where the mash is treated with just HCl. I needed >30mL for the mash of a 20L batch, and it was a bit painful to measure with a 5mL pipette, not to mention that I probably lost the integer count several times, but according to the pH meter my mistakes cancelled out. You of course don't have to use HCl alone, but I wanted to see what happens if I did; per a fermentor sample beer happens.
Once again thanks to everyone for sharing out their experience, and as a thread conclusion, if you have high-alkalinity water that's otherwise ~blank, consider adding food-grade HCl (E507 in Europe) in the strongest concentration that you feel comfortable handling to your brewing bag of tricks.
In a good way though!Having to dig a pool first is really going to delay my next brewday.
C'mon the stout isn't that bad!You need Murphy's sulphuric/ Hydrochloric acid mix![]()